01 September 2013 9:15 AM

Saturday PS: Classless? Priceless

AS one of the world's slowest readers, I finished Alwyn W. Turner's latest book A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s, (Aurum; £25) - despite having had a copy for two weeks - just as a not-universally-admired Tory Prime Minister lost a key vote in the House of Commons, partly through a revolt of his own backbenchers.

What goes round, eh?

Maybe. Before I go any further, I'd better say I am writing a proper review of A Classless Society for Lobster magazine, and when it is published I shall post a link. This is more of a personal response to what is a tremendous book.

At some point during the Nineties, my wife and I popped into a convenience store in London to buy a few of life's essentials (cigarettes, drink, newspapers, milk etc) and I chortled at the boast engraved on the window: 'Established 1976.'

How reassuring, I sneered, that some things never change, even in this fast-moving world. Wiser, as usual, than I, she pointed out that the shop's foundation year was, in fact, some way back in the past.

Well, the distance between that date and today is of the same order as the gap between that date and the mid-Seventies, which means that one of the first things to say about Mr Turner's subject-period is that it is now quite a long time ago. Somebody born the month John Major succeeded Margaret Thatcher would now be planning their 23rd birthday celebrations. I was in the same position at the start of Mrs Thatcher's battle with the miners with regard to the (pre-Profumo Affair) government of Harold Macmillan complete with Chancellor Selwyn Lloyd.

Who he? Exactly.

So let's recap the early Nineties: no WiFi, no BlackBerry, no smoking ban and, for most people, no computers able to do anything much more than word processing. A few sophisticates (including, I believe, the Duke of Edinburgh) had e-mail. Most of us did not. Usage of public telephone boxes was at peak levels, British Rail was still in business and not only was London Underground not obliged to offer wheelchair access, but an old by-law actually banned said wheelchairs from the Tube.

This book takes you there, and reminds you of the taste and feel of those times and of the Nineties in total. I am not going to cannibalise my review, but it is no secret that Mr Turner is very good also on the dominant political figure of Nineties Britain, John Major (now Sir John). His successor, Tony Blair, was much more a man of the Noughties, scene of both his triumphs (Sierra Leone, the second election landslide in 2001, the initial response to the September 11 attacks) and his tragedies (Iraq, the Kelly affair).

Reading A Classless Society confirms my own prejudice that the Nineties and the Noughties are very much a re-run of the Fifties and Sixties, but with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones emerging at the same time as new British cinema and kitchen-sink drama, i.e. in the Fifties, rather than, as was actually the case, a few years later.

Thus a major world conflict came to an end in 1945/1985 with the defeat of Hitler/the election of Gorbachev, a post-conflict mini-boom marked by a love of all things American, by double-breasted suits for men and a big-shouldered new-look for women and by the big band sound/rap music was swiftly succeeded by a hugely-unpopular official squeeze designed to drive down consumption and build an export-led economy (rationing and austerity then, Sterling's membership of the European Exchange-rate Mechanism in the early Nineties).

Both the Fifties and the Nineties ended very differently from the way they had started. In both cases, a grim first few years suggested a return to the crisis years of the past (the Thirties then, the Seventies and early Eighties in the latter decade). In both cases, such comparisons (of which I myself was guilty as a journalist on The Guardian in the Nineties) were wrong.

In both cases, the third and fourth years of the decade marked a surprising brightening of the economic circumstances of the average British household and in both cases the decade went out on a high - Macmillan's 'candy-floss summer' of 1959, the Millennium jollities of 1999.

Along with the need to move round some of the cultural furniture in making sense of any comparison of the Fifties and Sixties to the Nineties and the Noughties are the different comparisons of political leadership. With Blair, we ended up with an amalgam of Macmillan and Harold Wilson, i.e. we had a bad (albeit successful) actor with a Scottish surname, an English accent and a talent for taking power during an incipient boom merged with a Labour leader liked and trusted by the professional middle class but considered slippery by the media-political establishment.

But there is no such thing as a free lunch, and having got away with a merged Blair-Macmillan, we have then had to endure not one but two Edward Heaths, with Gordon Brown representing the 1970-1974 Prime Minister's resentful and awkward side and David Cameron his doomed attempts to replicate a successful Labour leader.

Someone once said that every head of the BBC will be worse than the last, and, returning to where I began, with a comparison of Major and Cameron, it is hard not to feel the same way about Prime Ministers. Lots of us (myself included) said beastly things about Major but nobody assumed he was a phoney.

The inauthenticity of David Cameron, however, is painful. When he gives one of his 'family friendly' speeches mentioning 'mums' and 'kids', one imagines his being briefed by advisors that these are the terms used by the lower class when referring to mothers and children.

Indeed, nothing he does seems believable. Photographed at the seaside, he gives rise to the suspicion that he dislikes the sea. Ditto drinking a pint of beer, sitting in a cafe with his wife or pretty much any other activity you care to mention.

For this, of course, we have to thank Major's successor and central figure of the latter part of this book, Tony Blair.

Mr Turner winds up his narrative at the time of Blair's second landslide, in June 2001. This is absolutely the right call, especially as he eschews any suggestion that presentiment hung in the air, that the cataclysmic events of that autumn were dimly foreseeable or any similar retrospective crystal-ball gazing.

He hints that the decade that followed the summer of 2001 is of less interest to him. Well, fair enough, although given that it involved Britain in two wars, put the City at the epicentre of a global financial crisis and ushered in the first formal Coalition Government since the war, you have to wonder whether Mr Turner will be able to resist writing about it.

No, I don't think so either.

In the meantime, this book proves beyond doubt that the Nineties were a very important decade. One day, there will be lots of books about this period.

I suspect that the first may well be the best.

Going South: Why Britain Will Have A Third World Economy By 2014, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Palgrave Macmillan

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